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These photographs are just a few I have taken over the last ten years at The Albany Bulb, also known as the Landfill, the Waterfront and just The Bulb. It is a place I feel passionate about. That much is obvious.
There are many of us who believe that this piece of the much hyped Eastshore State Park should have been left untouched and unmanaged - because it is a unique example of what happens when a place naturally and organically self regulates. But the dogma of 'preservation' and 'conservation areas' 'resource protection', 'habitats' and 'liability' overrules all individual identity. They cannot leave anything untouched, un-designed. It is as if if they (the park planners) didn't make it, it has no value.
Rules, guidelines, regulations, interpretive signage, fences, safety, sanctioned art - it leaves nothing to the imagination. That is what the landfill meant to us - a place of unlimited imagination.

July 04, 2007

Independence Day - here on the West coast it's a day of over-eating, sport, over drinking, car sales taxes beefing up impoverished city coffers, idiots lobbing illegal fireworks out into the streets, and a general forgetfulness of why exactly this day has been set aside for such merriment.

I don't like the Fourth - my dog Calvin shudders and pees in his pants at every boom, luckily Oscar and Roxy are deaf and Frank and Roo think it's fun to watch Calvin suffer. Kids, What can you do. Can't put them in the blender, right?

My fave passage from the old Declaration is this one -"....
all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,than to right themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same objectevinces a design to
reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government...

I think it's clear that we are willing to be slow boiled like a lobster, barely noticing the erosion of our civil liberties and our social conscience. I often wonder how it happened that the country that nurtured Goethe, Fontane, JS Bach, Kleist etc could so readily be goose-stepped into violent rage against its' own citizenry. And from there into a state of such mind-numbing denial, that when the concentration camps were rising in the countryside, the question was not 'how can we be building such things?' but 'why build such a thing here, near us, in the gorgeous german landscape?'.

Independence and freedom - not the same thing.

This brings me to what I think about on the 4th of July - and most other days. There is a poem written by an inmate of one of the Holocaust's death camps 'The Song Of Buchenwald'.

Written in German it has a haunting sweetness - Buchenwald , like many concentration camps was built near forests and countryside of stunning beauty. The verses speak of the horror of the camps. The chorus goes like this: